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By Chloe Smith
Hiatus Kaiyote is an Australian band made up of lead singer and guitarist Naomi “Nai Palm” Saalfield, bass player Paul Bender, keyboard player Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss. The band’s sound might be described as funk or jazz, but it has elements of psychedelic, electronic, R&B, and soul genres as well. In an interview with Ghina Sabrina with the whiteboard journal, Mavin said about the band’s fluctuating genre:
“There’s a massive palette that everyone’s influenced by. Everyone’s got their own love, their own specific music that they’re really passionate about and I think that’s kind of one of the reasons that it sounds like it sounds because we all don’t love the same shit. We all probably like it, but there are specifics that we all really fall on.”
Each musician brings their own ideas, background, and preferences to each song, and the result is a wide array of color, feeling, and sound in every album, that twists and turns from track to track. Their fresh sound has not gone unnoticed in the larger hip-hop and R&B world: prominent artists including Anderson Paak, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Beyonce and Jay-Z have sampled Hiatus Kaiyote in their own songs.
The 2021 album Mood Valiant is a long time in the making — their first album since their 2015 record Choose Your Weapon. During the recording of…
